


World Without End

by Nny



Category: Good Omens - Gaiman & Pratchett
Genre: Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-10
Updated: 2010-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-06 02:57:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nny/pseuds/Nny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Home' was always one of those subjective words, of course.</p>
            </blockquote>





	World Without End

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Beth H as part of the go_exchange, 2009

Above the third floor, the façade was starting to peel and crack - the gentle silvery shimmer of the shield bubble did little to hide how, above it, the roiling cloud of poisonous smog had stained the formerly pristine walls - but the Ritz was still among the foremost of the thousands of hotels in the city-state of London.

Although age rarely meant any more than frankly impractical height, there was something compelling about the fact that it was certainly one of the very oldest hotels, records stating that it had been established long before the Great War. It traced its origins back to when the ground London stood on had been made up of at least three different countries, before the Draining and subsequent building of the Southampton-Le Havre land bridge. Of course, records being what they were, almost precisely a quarter of the hotels in the city-state claimed just such a provenance, but there was something about the air of the Ritz that suggested it had been undisturbed for far longer than the exceptional upkeep might suggest.

There was one thing, however, that supported the Ritz's quiet assertion (for it would never be so crass as to _advertise_ such things). Unlike the majority of buildings in London, the Ritz laid claim to more land than was covered by its foundations; in fact, it boasted the very last 'park' on the planet (at least), except for those animated convincingly in the particularly advanced Vii-Rs. Quite how Green Park* came into the possession of the hotel at all was lost in the mists of time, but it made for a unique selling point and allowed the hotel to ask the most ridiculous of prices for even the smallest and most smog-bound of its rooms. Those on the ground, first and second floors came with a price tag that would make even the heirs to the Jobs fortune wince around their Botox, and a stay of more than a few days cost rather more than a luxury apartment in one of the Moon complexes.

It was considered worth the extortionate price tag, however. With more than one staff member per room in the hotel, and chefs good enough to make a nun swear (with her mouth still full), no business mogul would be considered worth dealing with until they had spent at least one night in a room that had remained almost entirely unchanged in the hotel's long history.

One guest could tell you just where the changes had been made, actually. Could tell you about the extensive reconstruction, when those suites that could realistically be recreated were carefully moved from the penthouse floor to the first and second, every tile and elegant mahogany whatnot placed precisely as it had been. Could tell you, too, about the unfortunate Ming thing that had held pride of place in the lobby until a careless elbow in 1943, and could probably also tell you precisely where the shards had been hidden.

He wouldn't, though.

Said guest was presently lounging on one of the beautifully upholstered blue settees in the Berkeley Suite, which he had been renting for rather longer than any of the staff members were able to remember, although much effort was expended to make sure that not a one of them ever noticed this fact. Loud music was playing; a famous conductor, passing in the corridor outside, paused a moment outside the suite's door and listened greedily to what was obviously a _very_ high quality (and most likely expensive) recording. It even had the gentle hiss, the soft pops that simulated ancient vinyl, which had been in fashion for a while around seventy years previously.

(In fact it actually _was_ ancient vinyl, Beethoven's 14th piano sonata picked up for a song and a dance and gold-plated banjo solo from Christies, and played on a distinctly _un_fashionable record player that had been bought in Woolworths some time in the mid 1970s.)

The elderly conductor moved on, and inside the suite the fluid run of piano notes somehow resolved themselves into a voice like a thousand flies buzzing gently in tune.

_Crowley_, it said, for that was the guest's name.

"Dagon," he acknowledged, picking up a pair of classic sunglasses from the side table and sliding them onto his nose. In years past – many, many years past – he'd always had a deferential sort of tone when Below chose to make its presence felt. Now he spoke with the vaguely bored voice of a colleague, perhaps even an equal. It would have been dealt with very swiftly indeed if Crowley had shown any sign at all of wanting a promotion; with the absence of even the slightest whiff of ambition, it tended to just make the other demons nervous.

_Checking numbers_, the voice continued sulkily. _Wouldn't want to find you were padding your figures. Thirteen in one morning?_

"Cancellation of the express service," Crowley told him distractedly, rummaging through one of the priceless vases for the wallet he was almost certain he'd deposited there. "Amazing how small a nudge it'll take when they're late for work."

_Hmm_, Dagon buzzed, the flies yodelling particularly dubiously around the Adagio. _Keep up the bad work then. Nice to see you so productive_. A pause and then, half-hearted and for form's sake more than anything, _Remember, I've got my eyes on you._

"Sure," Crowley said, unperturbed. "Ciao."

He waved his hand and the music abruptly ceased. It was breakfast time, and that in itself was a large part of the reasoning behind the long-term renting of the rooms. People in hotels were so very suggestible before they'd managed to get through their first cup of coffee, the more so if they were aware of how much that first cup was costing them and therefore unlikely to stretch to a second. A freely offered carafe, a little conversation, a carefully worded question and someone far less talented could weasel their wallets out of their back pockets; _he_ wasn't after anything they valued _nearly_ so highly.

There was something oddly satisfying, Crowley'd found, about filling your quota of souls for the day before you'd even got around to leaving home.

 

* and the attached St James' of course, although very few people apart from the most dedicated of historians – one, in fact, and 'person' was a bit of a stretch at that - knew to discriminate between the two.

*

'Home' was always one of those subjective words, of course. Home was where you hung your hat, where - if you admitted to having one - the heart was; if you wanted to get technical about it, 'home' to Crowley was probably in a place far away, somewhere rather warmer of climate yet surprisingly not particularly popular with the tourists. If you wanted to get sentimental about it, though, claim home as a feeling or a state of being rather than the place you kind of wished you didn't come from - well, that got a little more difficult, frankly.

Crowley had lived all over. Literally, actually; the only habitable place he hadn't got around to living yet was at the South Pole. It wasn't that it didn't appeal - demons weren't cold-blooded, despite the interesting things they could do with their tongues, and there was something nice about the idea of being as far, weather-wise, from 'home' as he could get - it was more that there was nothing he could've come up with that would have topped what they could think of to do to each other, given enough time and proximity, given the entire winter in darkness.

It was difficult to say where he'd actually liked living most, since it'd take him at least a week to remember everywhere he'd been, but there was something about London that kept pulling him back. It was a place of such extremes, such decadence and cruelty and every now and again such unutterable grace that it almost gave him whiplash. It was ugly and beautiful, functional and ridiculous, sublime and creatively profane. It changed around him at dizzying pace, and still managed to hold his memories within it like the photo album of a perpetual loner. The only other familiar face belonged to Aziraphale, so much so that he almost expected to run into him around every corner.

Then there was Tadfield, which had never been home but likewise held his memories; it still tugged a little at his brain and his sinuses – more so, lately, like an itch somewhere in the back of his mind, a strange sort of throbbing that continued long after the Antichrist had not so much died as _gone away_.

The one place that had never even begun to feel like home to him, oddly, had been his flat in Mayfair. It was more a place in which he stored his things and terrified his houseplants, somewhere he went back to at the end of the day and waited until the people came out again. (London was not the city that never sleeps; around 4:45am it tended to have a little nap, and Crowley liked to follow its example.) Instead, home in London was an assortment of strange places: sushi restaurants where they remembered your name; Spitalfields market on a Sunday afternoon; a heave- wonderful smelling tea shop on Neal Street; a small dusty back room of a small unregarded bookshop, where the brass bell tinkled only when people mistook it for the more colourful place next door.

There was a hole dug out in Crowley where a heart ought to have been; he'd left his heart in San Francisco so he could make a space for this, London inhabiting his chest like a sort of harmless tumour along with everything (everyone) he associated with it.

It had sort of made the flat irrelevant.

Crowley hadn't moved into the hotel directly, obviously; with the state of his investments at the time, that would have done for his resources in fairly short order. No – it'd taken the better part of two years before he'd admitted to himself that it apparently wasn't reversible any time soon, before he'd stopped looking around nervously whenever he invested in any of the more morally dubious companies in case of a disapproving glance that he'd forgotten wouldn't come. It hadn't really been all that long after that, though, that he'd noticed his flat wasn't nearly so appealing without a dusty back room to compare it to and the smugly superior feeling the comparison'd always brought.

The oddest thing about it, of course, had been the fact that Crowley hadn't known right away. It felt rather as though he ought to have, like an angelic messenger should've come down and told him – or maybe, judging by the way his life had a tendency towards going, fetched him a good ding around the back of the head and pinned a note to his back while his ears were still ringing. He should have _realised_, is the point. Should have worked it out sooner than the discreet notice in the _Telegraph_, paid for by the local Women's Institute, and wouldn't Crowley have made a meal of _that_ if anyone had been around to listen?

_In memory of Ezra Fell_, it'd said unobtrusively, in the quiet sort of typeface that suggests politely cleared throats and spotless embroidered hankies. _Left us for Heaven, 16th of March._

Crowley'd laughed for a good ten minutes over that.

And then he'd read it over a couple more times, just to be sure.

It was all sort of a blur for a little while after that – it was a long time ago, of course. Made sense that he couldn't remember a single _moment_ when he'd decided that the angel wasn't coming back, not any time soon at least, but it was about ten years after that when he'd bought the bookshop, just to have something to be sure of. The hotel had sort of made sense, then, and once the Official Damnations had started coming in from his superiors it'd seemed even more like a good decision all 'round. Amazing how productive he could be, without distractions.

After another few years, he even stopped dropping by the bookshop, just to check.

 

*

The food at breakfast had been excellent as usual and the service likewise, if a little less attentive than he was accustomed to.

"I - of course we can bring another," the Maitre d' was telling a large gentleman as Crowley got up to leave; the man sounded unprecedentedly flustered. "If you're sure you – "

His worried voice was lost in the gentle clatter of plates as another tray full of food emerged from the kitchen. Crowley carefully avoided the struggling waitress staggering in the direction of the glutton at table seven and headed for the front door, ignoring the really quite inappropriately lustfully locked couple by the grand staircase. What was the world coming to?

Taking a deep breath of the sterilized, slightly heavy air, Crowley turned – as was his habit – towards the nearest Tube station. Like hotel breakfast, public transportation had always seemed like a practical time-saving device, a means of tarnishing the largest number of souls in the shortest space of time, particularly when one factored in delays, construction, and whatever other subtle ideas lurked in the corners of Crowley's mind.

There was, though, still a small part of him that whimpered faintly when he remembered his Bentley and the way she'd never been quite the same since the apocalypse. Inanimate objects were apparently unwilling to forgive and forget when they'd been set on fire and then bullied back into health; they tended to hold grudges deep in their workings, and she'd finally gasped and shuddered her way to a painful stop and stranded him outside the bubble for the better part of seventeen days before anyone happened to notice him. (He could have walked back, probably, might well have made it without _irreversible_ damage, but he wasn't so cavalier with his body as _some_, he'd thought snippily at the time.)

It was that part, though – the small, whimpering one – that grabbed him by the throat as he passed the dealership and demanded his loose change.

In a time when protection from the elements was the single most pressing need, public transport was subsidised to the hilt and personal transportation was the ultimate in luxury items. But Crowley – through extensively investing in many of the companies that had ended up _causing_ this mess – could afford luxury items. And she was just _beautiful_.

The transport was shiny and black and… actually faintly clunky. Transports these days tended towards the low and sleek, everything about them suggesting speed and unnecessary expense until it was almost possible to see the oily sheen of exuded currency coating the bodywork. This vehicle certainly didn't lack that sheen, but something about her lines was more traditional, oddly familiar, and he didn't even need to see the winged B set discreetly on her bonnet to know her for what she was. His feet were carrying him up to the greasiest of the salesman before he'd even made a conscious decision to walk into the dealership.

Crowley'd had transports before. Obviously he'd had transports – it was very much a requirement of the job that he be all over, sooner or later, and you'd have thought he'd have relished the opportunity to really let loose on roads that barely saw traffic these days, but he'd found there was somehow something lacking; the joy of doing somewhere in the low hundreds of miles per hour had been diminished with the advent of suspension so good that you barely even noticed the astonished expressions of the mutated cows that you shot past. (Not to mention the fact that you could never tell if that was what they looked like _anyway_.)

That wasn't the whole problem with them, though. There was always something faintly soulless about the transports, all with the same metallic smell that they shared with new minted coins and automatic weaponry. They all had the same soothing voice, too, the one that Crowley had commissioned for lifts in shopping centres, hold messages, sat navs. The gentle calming tones had probably caused more road rage incidents than any five other causes put together; it wasn't just _any_ demon, Crowley'd thought with satisfaction, that could cause road rage in a _lift_.

This beauty, though, this was different. The salesman made a show of unlocking the transport, sending Crowley a conspiratorial smile over the sheer novelty of doing things the _old fashioned_ way, with a _key_ and everything. He pulled the door open to a slightly musty smell on the inside that suggested it'd been stuck in one place for too long, with the gentle tickle in the back of the throat that always came to mind when people said 'dust bunnies'.*

The interior wasn't leather – processed cows never had quite the same feel to them, and started to liquefy after a couple of years – but was instead a heavy dark fabric that danced back and forth over the line between black and deepest twilit grey, depending on how the light hit it. Crowley lifted his sunglasses and squinted at a headrest that had, just for a second, somewhere amongst its shifting shades, held the barest of whispers of tweed.

Crowley eeled his way into the driver's seat and scowled at the console – for nothing with as many knobs and dials and irrelevant lights could get away with being called a dashboard – and waited, as the salesman rounded the front of the car, for the first gentle admonishment about seat-belts.

When it spoke the voice was, instead of the blandly regionless female that Crowley'd been expecting, a male cut-glass English accent of the sort that had gone out of fashion while BBC announcers' microphones were still bigger than their heads.

"Passenger door open," it told him in gently remonstrative tones, and it brought on the bizarre urge to tuck his shirt in and make sure his fingernails were clean before it was replaced by the obsequious gloop that the salesman was busy ladling into his ear; the open-mouthed expression he'd been directing at the console swiftly shifted back into a scowl.

"I wish _I_ had a transport like that," a faint voice outside said enviously, as the salesman pulled the door shut behind him.

 

* He didn't react as violently to the frankly unnerving term as he'd used to, not after Aziraphale's face when he'd seen what'd happened to the bunny slippers malevolently lurking** behind the sofa.

** 'innocently left'

*

The CEO of one of the companies responsible for Crowley's current grin - of one of the companies that he had invested in heavily, in fact, the ones that allowed him to live and corrupt in such luxury – was actually in the place that had been weighing on the demon's mind. The borough of Tadfield was about as far off the beaten track as it was possible to get, and that had been rather its appeal; the last illness had been a difficult one, had been commonly thought to be, in fact, _the last illness_, and Tadfield had been chosen for its lack of - well, almost anything. They'd managed to find accommodation for him in somewhere fitting, although he was rarely awake to enjoy it - the bed was splendid, though, and that was something he could really get behind.

He was currently drifting vaguely somewhere between sleep and waking; aware of the remarkably soft cotton of his bed clothes and the gentle murmur of his good for nothing daughter just low enough not quite to be understood, but able also to cling on to the barest of dregs of dreaming, tangled between the tips of his fingers. They felt like cold sand that had been left unwashed by dead seas for too long, lonely beneath distant stars. And that was a lot more poetic than he tended to go in for, so he squinted around suspiciously for whoever'd put the thought into his head.

"Hello?" he said, only the daughter, who was attentive to the point of smothering now that there was the scent of a Will, didn't stop her soft conversation for even a moment. He couldn't really have been speaking; it felt stangely like he ought to have gotten an answer, though, like the space had been built around someone and was waiting for them to come back. He frowned a little, buried his fingers deeper into the ancient sand, and settled in to wait.

*

The test drive left the salesman looking greyer than his imitation designer suit, clinging white-knuckled to the door, but for Crowley it just confirmed what he'd already suspected: it was love. The Bentley's suspension was such that eighty miles an hour had felt almost like they were about to _take off_, the gentle reminder about speed limits from the car and the terrified whimpering from the passenger seat going unnoticed as Crowley pushed her to go even faster. By the time they got back to the dealership, Crowley was grinning wider than he had in longer than he cared to remember, and the salesman didn't even ask before making his wobbly (but transparently relieved) way to the office to fetch the paperwork.

Crowley stroked his hands gently over the steering wheel, his grin melting into an expression that felt even less familiar, something close to nostalgia; it was reflexive to turn to the passenger seat when a voice – as fond as it was familiar – broke the silence.

"You really are so very predictable," it said, and Crowley stared blankly at the empty seat for a long moment before he almost sprained a muscle snapping his head around to look at the console.

"What?" he said blankly. "Wait. _What?_"

"Passenger door open," it told him blandly.

Crowley blinked – an act almost entirely unprecedented – and it took the salesman three tries to get his attention long enough to get the paperwork signed.

After he'd managed that, buying the car was a relatively simple process; it was amazing how willing people were to settle things quickly when you were able to pay the asking price in full directly. Crowley got the impression that they'd really have liked to give him the red carpet treatment, could see the owner practically itching to drag him back to the office and offer him a bottle of something almost – but not entirely – unlike champagne. It would've taken a hell of a lot more than that, though, to get him to get out of the Bentley now.

"You won't have a problem with it, my personal guarantee," the salesman told him before he left, leaning through the window and smiling with an oily sort of glint. "It's a source of pride to us that our customers are one hundred percent satisfied." He nodded and repeated himself softly. "A source of very great pride."

"Pride," said Crowley uneasily, "yeah."

It was weird, he thought as he drove away; there'd been something a little too intense in the salesman's voice at the end there. Something a little too like religious fervour for him to be anywhere near comfortable.

Crowley eventually stopped off at a drive-thru Caffeine shop, ordering a couple of cups of what really ought to have been bland, flavourless energy drinks, but what turned out to be a faintly surprised USA* roast and a frankly gobsmacked cup of tea.** The latter he placed in a cup holder directly beneath one of the vents, and the rising steam was displaced by a breath of air conditioning that sounded suspiciously like a gently satisfied sigh.

"I'm not going mad?" he said after a minute's internal debate, directing his question at the screen of the sat nav, considering it rather better than talking into thin air. "I mean, it really is you?"

There was a moment's terrifying silence. Then the car spoke.

"I shouldn't like to judge before all the facts are in, my dear. After so long I'm not nearly qualified to assess your mental state; not that everyone's not entitled to a funny five minutes here and there of course, but – "

"_Angel_," Crowley growled, heart in his throat.

"But yes," the voice concluded, in the same matter-of-fact tone it'd used for normal things, non-completely-mindbending things, like seatbelts and tyre pressure and the breaking of seventeen separate driving-related laws. "It's me."

 

*United States of Africa

**Tea had never really taken to life under a bubble the way it'd been hoped, and had disappeared off the radar entirely over a century earlier. Crowley'd always suspected that the tea plants considered things too newfangled, these days. (And he blamed the angel for that train of thought entirely.)

*

The thing about Heaven, Aziraphale didn't really need to explain*, was that if one happened to inconveniently lose corporeality through an unfortunate encounter with a runaway elephant, or bus, or old lady with a heavy bicycle and poor night vision**, then it was considered that one had had one's chance. It wasn't like Hell, of course. At least it was possible to stay _occupied_ Below, with the torturing of damned souls or – he sounded slightly less certain – bureaucracy related admin, possibly? There was more to do, when it came down to it, than floating about with all the souls who had already managed to win the celestial game of whist, feeling faintly smug. Aziraphale imagined that there was rather less of a queue for the corporeal, Below.

"Don't believe it, angel," Crowley said wryly. "Never underestimate the appeal of just getting out of Hell."

"Ah," Aziraphale said, sounding rather uncomfortable. "I suppose that accounts for the recent productivity on your part? Laying claim to the post, and so on?"

Crowley rather pointedly said nothing, and Aziraphale went hurriedly back to his explanation.

It seemed that there had been some anomalies, lately. Inconsistencies in numbers, a marked rise on Hell's scorecard that couldn't be entirely explained away by – er - anyone's apparent zeal. There was certainly no Apocalypse pending, since Aziraphale rather thought that at least _one_ of them might have been informed of that, but there were enough oddnesses about goings on that he had apparently been drafted due to being an old hand at such things. Unfortunately, due to the temporary nature of these events, they hadn't managed to spare one of the prefabricated bodies, and Aziraphale had never been comfortable with vessels and possession and so forth.

"It's rather like wearing someone else's pyjamas," he informed Crowley primly. Crowley decided that for the sake of his sanity, already more than a little strained, it was probably better not to ask how he _knew_.

"So," he said instead. "You're back because of – what? A disturbance in the Force?"

"You really are quite odd, aren't you?" the stereo asked him wonderingly. "It's not just me?"

"Says the _car_," Crowley said sarcastically. "Besides which, don't even pretend you haven't seen Star Wars. _I_ wasn't the one who got us chucked out of the cinema for yelling at Lando."

"Hmmph." A vent let out a gentle huff of air that smelled strangely of dust and old paper, then mumbled something about simplistic notions of good and evil.

"You're telling me," Crowley muttered, then spun the wheel into a U-turn so patently flouting several laws – not least of which were those of _physics_ \- that it was actually a good few minutes before Aziraphale could get much beyond protesting sputters.

"What was _that_?" Aziraphale eventually managed shakily – although that might have been down to the way the transport was vibrating with speed.

"Got an idea what's going on," Crowley said absently as he coaxed the car around a hairpin bend. "Thing is, there's not many powerful enough to actually _do_ it."

"So we're going – "

"To find one of them." There was a long pause, and Crowley pushed his sunglasses a little further up his nose.

There was a gentle sound, and it took a moment to register as throat-clearing and not something protesting in the engine.

"What?"

"I – rather thought you'd need a little more persuasion," Aziraphale said, a little hesitant.

Crowley shrugged, his voice deliberately blank.

"It's not like I don't remember what you'd say anyway," he said.

The journey after that was largely silent and, for the most part, uneventful; Crowley refused to pull over for a closer look at the road rage incident, no matter how gently Aziraphale tried to ease on the brakes.

"Wrath," he said instead, and pressed a little harder on the accelerator.

 

* But did, anyway; there wasn't a lot of idle chatter in Heaven. Crowley let him talk because it gave him an excuse to keep driving the Bentley aimlessly, and absolutely not in any way because he'd missed the angel's voice.

** "And was it –?" Crowley asked, as innocently as he could manage.   
"No," said Aziraphale heavily, finally, and Crowley made note to ask about it at the least convenient time available. Possibly corporeality and the consumption of hot liquids ought to be involved.

*

The job market in Tadfield hadn't exactly been the main reason that had persuaded her to move here, but Zinzi Thomas was really starting to regret taking this job in particular as she clapped her hands together and stamped her thin-soled shoes. It was far colder than it ought to be at this time of year, and strangely specific - it felt like someone was breathing chilled air against the back of her neck, the skin of her wrists where her sleeves were just too short to touch the edge of her gloves, her face above the scarf she'd wrapped high over her mouth and nose. When she looked, though, there wasn't even a trace of movement in the leaves on the trees.

She shouldn't be here. Security hadn't exactly been a passion of hers; she'd always wanted to be a hairdresser, actually, but her mother had insisted on A-levels instead of training, had forced her into precisely enough education to be over- or under-qualified for every job she'd ever thought about applying for.

This one'd been easy to get, though, even with her lackadaisical approach to handing in application forms, to actually looking for a job. It'd appealed to her sedentary nature; just a couple of circuits of a house every hour or so, the rest of the time tucked up safely with a cup of tea and a bank of monitors to keep an eye on, nothing more challenging than that.

It bemused Zinzi, what they could have in this place that needed so much protection; they didn't seem to occupy much more of the place than the old library, the old man accompanied for the most part by his nurse except for the hour or so that his daughter visited each day. (She'd been the one that had hired Zinzi, and apart from the interview they'd not really had much contact. There was something about her that convinced Zinzi this was a good thing.) There were probably some antiques in the place, but everything was covered in such a thick coating of dust that it was impossible to tell what was worth anything, and it would probably be more trouble than it was worth to find out. Whatever it was had to be in the library and she'd poked her head in once or twice to see, but apart from the old man and the huge mirrors in one corner there was nothing aside from old books, and who'd pay her wages to protect _those?_

Zinzi shrugged her shoulders up around her ears, unwilling to expend the energy on extending the train of thought any further. It didn't seem worth it, frankly. To tell the truth, she wasn't sure she could be bothered continuing the circuit around the outside of the building, not when there didn't seem a point to her being there. She considered returning to the room she'd been sat in, the high stool and ranked monitors and the kettle that was waiting, but it was so much effort, when the driveway was a flat surface and so much closer…

*

Aziraphale managed to hold his tongue – metaphorically, obviously – while parked by the shore where Crowley stood and watched the sea lapping greasily at the shield bubble, even the silver sheen not enough to disguise the sickly-rainbowed brown of it. He kept his silence through what remained of Manchester, where the shielding technology hadn't quite managed and Crowley had to manufacture a compelling distraction to get past the guards at the gate in the double-reinforced steel walls that had taken its place.

Apparently the rutted track to the rubbish tip that now took up the majority of what had once been Essex was the final straw, though. First the indicator lights started blinking annoyingly, like the tap of a restless foot, then the windscreen wipers twitched; he'd never been able to stay still when he'd had a body, either, not if there'd been something he'd wanted to know. Crowley grinned a little to himself, determinedly shrugging off the faintly sick feeling that Manchester had left, and tapped a gentle rhythm on the steering wheel just to be annoying.

"Well?" An exasperated voice asked eventually, impatience evident in the way the steering wheel pulled against Crowley's hands; so far the angel had mostly let him drive.

"Well I'd hoped that - ha!"

Crowley left the engine running - it was only appropriate - and leapt out of the car, forging his way over a pile of threadbare tyres towards where a small white-hatted figure in a fluorescent jacket directed rubbish trucks towards a dumping ground, one that was edging worryingly close to one of the few clear spaces left, so far untouched because of the reasonably clear brook that flowed across it.

"Mr White, I presume?" he called breathlessly as soon as he was within hailing distance; the young man looked around, white hard hat slipping forward a little over colourless eyes and revealing more of the dirty white-blond hair that had grown long enough to hang over his collar.

"I should get rid of him, Bianco?"

The speaker was tall - quite a bit taller than Crowley, actually, and the fact that her occupation involved lugging bits of furniture, ancient appliances and the remains of transports was pretty clear from the breadth of her shoulders. And yes, Crowley was a demon, but there was such a thing as advisable caution; broken limbs were always so inconvenient. He stopped a little way off and gave a small wave, trying to look as trustworthy as a man in snakeskin shoes could manage.

"Mr Crowley's good people," currently-Bianco said, then giggled softly at the irony. "From another life, you might say."

The bin person - cleanliness maintenance technician? - nodded and moved to a wary distance, and Bianco stepped closer. (Or Albus, or Chalky; whatever name you referred to him by, it left the same unpleasant taste on the tongue.) Crowley shifted his weight as the muck under his feet moved in a sort of gentle slithering that made it feel suddenly horribly unstable; made it feel almost alive. _Hungry_.

"I'm not here to - " He cleared his throat. "Bygones, and all that. Sewerage under the conduit, or something. We've got no unfinished business here, am I right?"

"And yet, weirdly, I don't trust you." Bianco smiled slowly, teeth shockingly stained against his chalk-white skin. He glanced over at the car, silhouetted against the neon sunset; say what you like about the guy, Crowley thought grudgingly, he'd done a lot for the aesthetics of evenings. Bianco snorted out a laugh and looked back at Crowley, unsettlingly pale eyes considering.

"Incompetent magician," he said.

Crowley frowned. "...sorry?"

Bianco leaned forward and lowered his voice, conspiratorial. "You've a pigeon trapped in your glove box," he said, the faint waft of his breath making Crowley wince.

"I suppose that's one way of putting it," he said, agreeably, managing to talk almost normally around his stomach, which was making a concerted bid for escape through his mouth. "An incompetent magician, too."

Bianco removed his hard hat, shaking out his white hair, looking - in spite of the fluorescent jacket - nothing even close to human. Crowley swallowed hard and took a careful step back, his shoe slithering over the side of a discarded bottle and jarring him painfully.

"Seems the two of you together wasn't ssso good for me, lassst time," Pollution said, with a slimy hiss to his voice that put Crowley's best effort to shame.

"But this is different," Crowley insisted, hands out for balance as the heap shifted again, starting to close over the tops of his shoes. "It's not like - I only want information, honest, I'm not trying to - like I _could_, anyway, the way you've managed to get a hold on this place." His voice broke into an embarrassing sort of squeak at the end, and a laugh bubbled out of Pollution like noxious gases out of garishly coloured barrels.

"It'sss true, that." He turned and looked out over the heaped mounds of rubbish, the mountain range of broken transports to the East, the shimmering lake of TV screens glinting in the dying sun in the West. His silhouette solidified a little against the sunlight, and when he turned around he looked almost human again, just about forgettable. "It's probably why War and Famine're acting out," he said wisely, patronisingly, like he wasn't their youngest by far. "Hate having to admit that I'd clearly won."

"So it is them, then, bringing on the Sins," Crowley said flatly, with the resignation of a demon who'd faced worse than this before but really hadn't been thinking his luck could ever be so bad again. "Not just one or the other."

"It's a kind of courtship ritual, I suppose," Pollution said in a dreadful oily sort of over-friendly tone, like they were discussing the foibles of mutual friends. "It's difficult to say it with flowers when you're us; saying it with corpses has always been so much more effective."

"What, arranging them into the shape of the letters, sort of thing?" Crowley asked absently, his brain entirely too occupied with the images to pay much attention to what his mouth was saying.

"Well no," said Pollution, but he was sounding thoughtful; probably pondering how best you could manufacture an 's'.

"So – " Crowley shook his head and tried to get back on track. "So up until now they've just been occupying themselves then?" He started to carefully extract one foot and then the other, trying not to rest too much weight on any one spot. It was lucky he was so bendy, really. "I mean, it seems weird they've waited this long since the Apocalypse to make a move."

Pollution considered him for a long moment, his head tilted to one side.

"You're tougher than you look - "

Crowley blinked. "Thank - "

" - like grease stains on glasses."

" - you. Er."

"Resilient, too."

"I - suppose?" Crowley considered starting to edge towards the car; it'd probably be the last move he ever made, but this was starting to sound a little too much like a compliment for his tastes, which had never - to be quite frank - run towards the personification of waste products.

But then Crowley froze in astonishment, as Pollution told him what was actually going on.

*

"Sorry, let me get this straight." Even filtered through the sharp as a pin stereo system as it was, the incredulity in Aziraphale's voice didn't mirror how Crowley was feeling nearly so well as a facial expression would have. Especially on Aziraphale's face. There was this thing he always used to do with his chin –

"The tall chap. With the – " Aziraphale interrupted his train of thought, audibly flailing for words.

"Bones, yep," Crowley filled in helpfully. "Dresses in black, TALKS LIKE THIS? _Death_."

"And he's disappeared." If Aziraphale were corporeal, he'd have been restless. It was all in the tone of voice; he'd be pacing between the damp-swollen window and the occasional table with the wobbly leg that held the geranium Crowley'd given him in 1987*. He'd probably be wringing his hands, too. Crowley'd be settled into a corner of the unfortunately-green sofa and smirking, letting the angel's nervous energy do for the both of them; in the absence of that particular outlet, of that particular _bookshop_, he tapped out the bass line of 'Another One Bites the Dust' and, inadvertently, discovered the horn.

"Apparently," Crowley said, watching the disgruntled and lopsided flight of the seagulls he'd startled. "Only it seems a bit – I mean, sabbaticals are all very well but you wouldn't think he'd want us, or at least our respective _agencies_, involved, would you? It's not really how things work, is it?"

"So you're suggesting – " Aziraphale flicked the ignition into life with a quiet purr, like the beginning of a nervous habit. " – no, I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're suggesting."

"Me neither," said Crowley, which wasn't entirely true. "I just know that I really don't like it."

He squinted out of the windscreen, annoyed at the dull grey shimmer that the sunset had left behind it. If life had any sense of occasion – and it did, he knew that better than practically anyone – it really ought to have been raining; there should have been low menacing clouds, and lightning, and the distant growl of far-off thunder. Crowley missed weather.

The gentle splatter of the seagulls' revenge against the Bentley's roof wasn't quite the same, really.

Still, you took atmosphere where you could find it, and there was nothing like the atmosphere that you carried around with you.

A pair of sunglasses, a damned nice car, almost practically God as his co-pilot, and "Hey-ho," said Anthony Crowley.

* Aziraphale never seemed to notice that it really didn't ought to have lived so long and Crowley'd certainly never told him. It was probably dead now, in any case.

*

What Crowley knew was this:

Things of an ethereal nature - or occult, as may be - were never quite comfortable taking place in the world. They tended to be too big, not just for the brains of the humans that saw it* but also for the very scenery, the backdrop being forced just a little out of shape to hold the strangeness within it. It meant that these places were - although apparently quite normal - just a little more ready to stretch reality again, to allow for oddness that your average sort of countryside couldn't be having with at all.

Apparently there was an area something like that in Cardiff Bay, another in the back of some mad old gentleman's wardrobe in the country somewhere; and then there was here, back where so many things had started.

Tadfield Manor, previously Tadfield Hospital and home to the order of Chattering Nuns, had settled into something close to decrepitude over time. The top floors were cracked and unfortunate, as with all buildings these days, but to be quite frank the lower floors weren't that much better. Efforts had been made here and there to spruce it up a little, pretend it wasn't quite so bad as all that, but the cheerful lacy curtains peeking between the skeletal ivy branches that swarmed the front of the building gave the appearance of brightly coloured plasters taped carefully over a gaping head wound.

There were signs of life, though; gentle light from a ground floor window fell on the sparsely gravelled forecourt, reflected off the grille of the inexpensive transport parked there. There were no security lights, though, no other means of relieving the darkness, so Crowley was left entirely unprepared when the steering wheel spun quickly against his hands and the transport lurched to the left with a crunching shower of gravel. The crack of the window against his temple had Crowley hissing words that hadn't been formed by any human tongues in years almost uncountable.

"_Really_," the sat nav said.

"Try giving me some _warning_," Crowley grumbled. "What the - what in - why did you _do_ that?"

"You didn't see her?"

Crowley squinted at the screen of the sat nav, confused. "I didn't see - ?"

"There was a woman in the road," Aziraphale said. "Just sort of lying there."

"Hunh," Crowley said, not entirely sure the blow to the head hadn't disordered things inconveniently. "It's a novel security system, I'll give them that."

"Well?" Aziraphale prompted, ignoring him with the ease of long practice.

"Well what?"

"Well aren't you going to go and _check_ on her," Aziraphale continued implacably. "Honestly."

"I - what?" Crowley frowned at the sat nav, although Aziraphale's voice had apparently migrated to the air vents, probably to make the impatient huffs that much more effective. "Since when is it my responsibility to deal with inappropriately napping maidens? I'm not Prince Charming, or whoever."

"Hardly," agreed Aziraphale tartly, and Crowley's mouth tightened; that'd stung.

...and apparently he'd hit his head a little harder than he'd thought. He rolled his eyes and flicked a switch, the electric window humming down far enough that he could stick his head out.

"Hello?"

There was no answer from the darkness outside the car, and Crowley pulled his head back in, satisfied that whatever the angel'd thought he'd seen -

"Oh come _on_."

But the engine had turned off and couldn't be persuaded to turn over, no matter how many times Crowley turned the key. With a helpful little click the door beside him unlatched and clunked open, and Crowley swung his feet out of the car with a highly uncomplimentary comment about angels and their interfering ways.

Even with his excellent night vision, it took him a couple of moments to spot her; she was dressed in the frankly uninspired dark uniform of inexpensively hired security and merged with the shadows. Once spotted, he saw that she was nondescript, younger than he would've expected for this sort of job, and apparently lying quite comfortably with her hands laced over her stomach and a cloud of tightly curled hair pillowing her head.

"You alright?" he asked, more because Aziraphale was listening than because he actually cared; catch him caring about something like that.

"Fine," she answered shortly, in a low and indifferent voice. Apart from the white cloud of breath emerging through her scarf, nothing about her moved even the slightest bit.

"Couldn't help noticing you were lying in the road," Crowley continued.

"Mm," she answered unhelpfully.

"Not part of the job description, I'm thinking? Otherwise you might want to get onto your union about that one." Crowley took a couple of steps closer, and contemplated nudging her with his foot; not really to check on anything, since she was quite obviously alive, but because there were certain impulses that just _happened_, when you were a demon. "Look," he said finally. "No offense or anything, but my fr- my transport and I really need to be getting on, so if you could just - "

"No," she said. "I'm good here."

"Yes," said Crowley, frustrated, "but _here_ is in the middle of the road, in case you hadn't noticed. I mean, what possessed you to choose this particular spot for your twilight siesta?"

"Don't know," she said listlessly. "Couldn't really be bothered to find anywhere else."

"Right," Crowley said flatly, "of course." And he bent to hook his hands under her armpits, tugging her towards the angel.

"What?" Aziraphale asked, as the back door swung open.

"Sloth," Crowley said shortly, and continued heaving her dead weight into the back seat of the car. Why did humans have so many inconvenient limbs?

"Oh, the poor dear," Aziraphale said worriedly, and there was suddenly a jauntily tartan blanket draped over the back of the seat where Crowley certainly would never have allowed one. He glared at it balefully before draping it over the security guard, who reacted not at all. Closing the back door gently, Crowley went around to the driver's seat again and settled himself in place, not bothering to put on his seatbelt.

"Can you feel it?" he asked quietly. In spite of the ordinary look to the place, the friendly and warmly orange light glimmering in the window, there was a sly prickling along his arms and legs, the skin on the back of his neck pushing up into goose pimples as the hair slowly stood itself on end. He was half-hoping that Aziraphale would deny all knowledge, would be completely unaware of the feeling of uncomfortably charged potential about the place, but his life had never really worked that way.

"What is it?" the angel asked, hushed voice barely stirring the air. "Should we – "

_Well I don't know,_ was what Crowley wanted to say. _We've got a suspiciously quiet house, a missing anthropomorphic personification, an atmosphere that feels just about stretched to breaking point with all the things that aren't happening here just yet, and you're a _car_. Should we?_  
"Guess I'd better go find out," was what made it out of his mouth.

Oddly, it wasn't difficult to fall back into the role he'd once inhabited so uncomfortably; Crowley would've said, once, that he hadn't a heroic bone in his body, but that was before he'd got into the bloody Arrangement with the angel, before the occasional dalliances with heavenly duties (and the tea and the biscuits and the way the little dusty back room of a little dusty bookshop had begun to feel like home.) It would've been nice to have some kind of reaction, though. Some sort of small protest to show that the angel _cared_. Maybe it was something he'd got out of the habit of – this time yesterday, Crowley would've said he had, too. And yet here he was, making his slow way across softly crunching gravel.

His hands were tingling uncomfortably and he flexed them restlessly before unlocking the Bentley's boot, rummaging around beside the spare tyre so that he could lay his hands on –

It was just where he'd expected it to be. The tyre iron was heavy and familiar in his hands, impossibly unchanged and strangely comforting in spite of how little use it'd no doubt be. He swung it experimentally and then quickly ducked out of the way as the boot slammed violently shut.

"_Careful_!" he yelled, and then jumped again as a hollow voice emerged from the exhaust pipe by his knee.

"I can't let you do it," Aziraphale said, whatever emotion his voice might've carried distorted entirely by lengths of metal. "We have absolutely no idea what's going on in there!"

"I've faced an Apocalypse," Crowley answered, his voice holding far more bravery than he felt. "How much worse could it be?"

"Don't tempt fate," Aziraphale snapped, and Crowley snorted.

"Thought it was all a divine plan."

"Precisely! Why do you think I'm so worried about you?"

There was the faintest of suggestions of warmth in the depths of Crowley's stomach, at that. He did his best to ignore it.

"Much as I appreciate the sentiment – well, no offense angel, but you're not exactly inconspicuous."

"I'm aware of that, Crowley." Even through the empty echoes of the exhaust, Crowley could hear that it was metaphorical hand-wringing time again.

"Besides, who's going to look after the innocent victim there if we both go in? Not fair for her to get caught up in the machinations of the occult, right?"

"I hate it when you use logic, you old serpent," Aziraphale told him helplessly and without even the slightest trace of rancour. "I just wish – wait, couldn't you take the thingy?"

"The thingy?" Crowley asked blankly.

The driver's door flew open, rocking the entire transport.

"The _thingy_!" Aziraphale's voice called, distant but far clearer, the excitement palpable. "The ordnance survey gadget!"

"Are you talking about the sat nav?" Crowley asked, faintly appalled at the angel's persistent inability to even _pretend_ he existed in the same world as technology.

"Exactly! You can unplug it and take it with you, can't you?"

Crowley made his dubious way to the front of the car again, leaning into the passenger side door.

"You're sure about this?" Crowley was tugging gently at leads, making sure it was detachable. "I mean, it might not be the most comfortable of things…"

"What's a little discomfort in the fight against – Ow! No need to tug so _hard_!"

* Which was generally what led to a lot of dazed expressions and explanations involving mass hallucinations, gas leaks or music festivals.

*

"What on Earth have you been keeping in here?"

Aziraphale's tinny whisper, emerging from Crowley's distended jacket pocket, did little to break the thick silence of the dust encrusted foyer, but Crowley couldn't prevent himself from clapping a hand over his pocket warningly in any case. There had been no problems so far; centuries old locks held little difficulty for Crowley, and there wasn't anything of a more supernatural nature to back them up. The lack of protection would have him thinking he'd come to the wrong place if it weren't for the distinct hum in the air. It would've been unnoticeable to any human visiting, of course, but it was setting Crowley's teeth on edge.

"Shh," he hissed under his breath, grateful for the thick dust that carpeted the marble flooring and muffled his footsteps.

"It smells like brimstone," Aziraphale continued irrepressibly. "You haven't been - is this an evil pocket? Have you put me in an evil pocket? You could have found somewhere else."

"One," Crowley whispered back at him, pausing next to the staircase, "all of my pockets are evil by definition, since they belong to a demon. It's not like I'm going to be carrying crucifixes around with me, is it? And two, it's not brimstone, it's Clarissa Klein's _Temptation_ and it cost me more than your bookshop."

"My - " There was silence from his pocket for a long moment. "You bought my - "

"Just stop talking, okay?"

"Right," said the angel, his voice still coloured with surprise. "Of course."

"Good," Crowley told him, and gripped the tyre iron a little more tightly as he took a step closer to the door.

It was obviously the source of the light they'd seen from outside. While the rest of the house was still and silent, hung thickly with cobwebs, this door had a distinct track through the dust that led straight to it. The door had darkened with age but was clearly of good quality, and the brass doorknob shone in even the barest light that managed to ease through the gaps around the edges of the door. From beyond it came the slightest hum of a voice, and that was possibly the strangest of all; despite the heavy feeling in the air, the discomfort that was almost palpable, it didn't sound in any way ominous. There was no steady monotone that suggested chanting, no hint of maniacal laughter, just the soft rise and fall of friendly conversation. Crowley felt a cold finger of something close to fear trailing the length of his spine.

"Alright," he said, and took the last couple of steps to the door, wrapping the fingers of his free hand around the cold brass of the knob. "Here goes nothing."

"That's it?" Aziraphale was whispering shrilly, as he started to push it open. "That's the extent of your plan?"

"Always worked for me so far," he murmured under his breath, which caught in his throat at the sight that met him.

He wasn't sure precisely what it was he'd been expecting, but it certainly hadn't been this.   
The focal point of the room, centred under high ceilings with cracked plaster and a half-disintegrated ceiling rose, was a huge four-poster. The stains on the upholstery suggested it had been dragged down from an incompletely-protected room upstairs, but they could equally have been from any number of years of use; the heavy wood wasn't the sort that existed any more and the amount of fabric would have been deemed beyond excessive by the Unified Europe even a hundred years ago. The metal stand next to it with the IV running from it and the gently flashing machines were jarring against it; while the bed was strange in the old fashioned room that was clearly once designed to be a library, it wasn't nearly so discordant. The cracked leather of the book spines that teemed on the shelves echoed the wrinkled skin of the elderly man sleeping under age-yellowed sheets.

Gentle flames were flickering in the fireplace, and a delicate settee was pulled uncomfortably close to it to make room for the magnificent bed. This was apparently where the voice had been coming from, although the well dressed woman had now fallen silent and was staring at Crowley with wide eyes and an open mouth. The only sound in the room was the soft repetitive hiss of a respirator.

"Er," he said, and glanced down at the tyre iron he was still clutching tightly in his hand, then looked up again with a friendly grin. "Don't suppose you know where I could get hold of a spare tyre?"   
Crowley's gaze continued to flit around the room as the woman stood, smoothing down a dress that was clearly expensive, incongruous against the dust that filled the rest of the mansion. There really didn't seem to be any sort of danger here; apart from the bed and the rather squashed sofa, the only furniture was a curious arrangement of screens in a shadowed corner of the room, draped with blankets and placed closely together on a rug. He'd have ignored it entirely if it hadn't been for the way that her eyes were flicking over to them and away again in a manner that positively screamed deliberate and white-knuckled insouciance.

"I don't believe there's a mechanic in the immediate area," she said in a voice as smooth and polished as the leather-bound Joyce in pride of place by the fireplace, and just about as unreadable. "You'll forgive me for not answering the doorbell, but I'm sure I didn't hear it ring."

"Yeah, no," Crowley said casually, moving a little further into the room and trying not let his hackles too obviously rise as the invisible atmosphere of tension ratcheted higher. "Sorry about that, your security person let me in. Interesting that," he continued in a deliberately casual voice. "Security guards. Wouldn't have expected you'd have too much to look out for, not in a lovely little village like this."

"You'd be surprised," she answered, through the thinnest possible of smiles.

"Don't suppose I could borrow a telephone?" he ventured, refusing to quail under the look that was sent his way (apparently inadvertently, from the way she immediately looked down, went back to smoothing nonexistent wrinkles from her dress). Crowley walked forward and held out the hand that wasn't still holding the tyre iron as tight as his nerves were strung. "Miss –"

"Amanda Cuttington," she said with a tight shake, the skin of her hand stretched tightly over bone. Her names were said as though they were a unit, as though one meant nothing without the other attached, and after a moment they registered; she was heir to one of the founders of the largest London amalgam (since there was no such thing as individual businesses any more). Last Crowley had heard, her father had been on his way out, but that'd been a few months ago, and the way he'd heard it the countdown was in hours rather than days. His gaze slid over to the bed again, to the unconscious man whose narrow chest was still slowly rising and falling, and the slimy niggling suspicion that had wormed its way into his mind dragged his head around to stare towards the corner of the room.

*

Stories and legends and traditional beliefs were lonely creatures and liked to clump together around certain things; there were endless stories about what'd happen if a black cat happened to cross your path, for instance, but there wasn't all that much concerning one that was ginger.

Stories liked shadows, and clustered around death; stories were vain and liked hearing themselves in the retelling, crowding tight in front of mirrors until you could never be sure it was your own face looking back at you. Aziraphale had always been better at remembering the official versions of the stories, pinned carefully as they were between the pages in his bookshop, but Crowley had always had a bit of a feel for them too. It was amazing how easily they could be used.

So he knew how stories huddled around death, knew about the pennies and the lilies and the piece of bread laid out on the chest, knew about partying and mourning and singing until the shadows were gone; and he knew, too, about covered mirrors in the house of someone who'd died so the soul couldn't get trapped and lose its place in Heaven. It wasn't true of course, not precisely, but as with all stories there was a thread to it which, if tugged, could pull the world to pieces around it. And the shrouded screens - mirrors? – in the corner seemed to form a heavy place in the world, as though Crowley was standing on a slope and couldn't have stopped his feet carrying him in that direction even if he'd tried it.

He took a couple of sideways steps, hurried and unsteady, as Ms Cuttington moved towards the phone.   
"Oh," said the smallest of voices from his pocket, "that doesn't feel good at all..."

And then he was on the rug, already reaching out to pull the dust sheet away from blind glass when something in his stomach suddenly registered a protest.

Unlike the angel, he had absolutely no problem swearing at all.

"An insurance policy?" he hissed, kicking aside the rug where it covered chalk marks drawn carefully in a circle on the floor.

"Apparently I needed it," Ms Cuttington answered, and he was expecting her to be carrying a phone so it took a moment to register that that wasn't what was in her hand at all. She tilted her head to one side, the gun trained steadily on him as she looked him up and down. "What are you, precisely?"

"Something you're really not ready to deal with," Crowley answered with admirable bravado.

"Oh I doubt that," she said with a delighted trill of laughter. "I really do. You have no idea what I'm capable of."

"I'm getting there."

It was theoretically possible, Crowley supposed, to catch something more than just souls in a mirror arrangement like this one. If you knew who you were expecting, if you were willing to risk the right bait. But –

"You have to see that it's not going to – " Crowley was trying to force his voice into unfamiliar tones of sympathy, wishing the angel was a little more present; condolences from a sat nav wouldn't really have the right effect. "He might not be dying but he's not alive, either. Keeping Death away from him's not extending your father's life so much as it's diluting it. It's not going to bring him _back_."

She laughed again, a nape-pricklingly cheerful sound.

"I'm sorry, you think this is for _him?_"

"Er," said Crowley. "Well until about five seconds ago, yes?"

"Believe me, this isn't for his benefit. 'It's not an easy thing, building up a business you know,'" she said, her tone making it clear that she was parroting words that she'd heard many times before. "Lord, I barely know the man. He was a distant relative who turned up occasionally and apologised for forgetting my birthdays, why on Earth would I put myself out merely to extend his life?"

"So - why _did_ you put yourself out?" Crowley asked, nonchalantly inching towards the closest mirror. Her gun snapped around to follow him.

"Now now, none of that, thank you."

He spread his hands a little, smiling, just your average defenceless demon - which actually wasn't that far from the truth. The circle was ancient magic, and as long as he was inside it he had no chance of affecting anything; no cunning switching of bullets for jets of water, not this time. He was pretty much buggered, actually, unless the angel could come up with something.

It was difficult to hold out much hope.

"My father did nothing for me," Cuttington was continuing, "except get me used to a life so obscenely excessive in all its aspects that I can't function without haemorrhaging money."

"Sounds terrible," Crowley told her dryly.

"You have no idea," she said seriously. "And now he's fallen into decrepitude," she cast a scornful glance towards the bed and the man lying in it, and Crowley edged a little further again, "and the money will eventually run out, and how can I be expected to live without it?"

"So you decided to capture Death."

"The last real threat!" She was getting more and more distracted by her tale now, allowing him to drift ever closer to an advantageous position. He never thought he'd be grateful for the James Bond films going out of style, but there was something wonderful about the lack of irony in her crowing.   
"We've conquered the stars," she declaimed, "eliminated all but the most persistent of diseases, but still there is one thing we can't – have you any _idea_ how much could be paid for the secrets behind conquering _Death_?"

"Don't think he has many secrets," Crowley said absently, calculating angles. "You can pretty much see right through him." (There was a tiny snort from his pocket; Aziraphale was always helpless against puns.)

She suddenly noticed how far he'd advanced. "Don't move," she said warningly, but it was too late; Crowley raised the tyre iron over his head (secretly appreciating the picture he must make) and swung, bracing himself for the impact of a bullet.

"Duck," said the little voice.

From outside there was the hell hound growl of a transporter engine and the room was showered in dust and shattered stone as a Bentley ploughed through the front wall.

*

Silvery dust glinted beneath Amanda Cuttington's immaculate (and quite obscenely expensive) high heels; she wasn't sure quite how she'd managed to get herself safely into the lobby.  
Except… except the dust looked rather less like dust than it did like sand, now she looked closer. A strange sand, less gritty than it ought to be, and shining in starlight that meant unless the help had really let the ceiling go -

"Hello Amanda," came a familiar voice.

"What are _you_ doing here?" she snapped. If looks could kill, her father would be out of her hair forever; instead he was looking rather healthier than she'd seen him in years.

"Waiting," he said.

"For whom, exactly?" she asked, snidely.

ME.

Amanda stared into empty eye sockets, into the barest glimmer of blue that twinkled, miles and years and eternities deep.

"You can't - " her voice, starting out as a bare whisper, steadied and strengthened. "You don't frighten me," she said. "I caught you, I _trapped_ you. You wouldn't touch me."

NO. NOT EVEN WHEN YOU BEG.

There was a slight shifting of light, of shadow, and he was gone, her father with him. Amanda spun in a small circle and laughed, delighted that she had beaten him so thoroughly –

\- and saw, for the first time, the emptiness of the desert.

Her laugh, at least, died.

*

Aziraphale's voice was weaker than it had been, but that was less to do with the crumpled front of the Bentley and the smashed headlights than it was the crumpled figure on the floor.

"I didn't mean - I didn't want to - "

Crowley patted a fender comfortingly.

"She was definitely thwartable, angel. She'd have done the same to anyone who got in her way, I'm pretty sure; just because I wouldn't technically have died doesn't mean she didn't deserve the flaming sword treatment."

"This isn't what they sent me back for," he said miserably. "I shouldn't have - "

"Saved the day?"

Demons were vain creatures, it was pretty much part of the job description, but Crowley was willing to give up credit this once.

"If you hadn't distracted her I would've been toast," he told Aziraphale firmly, "and then who would've unleashed Himself?"

"Well," Aziraphale said uncertainly, "I suppose I might have helped a little."

The back door of the Bentley gave reluctantly when Crowley tugged on it, the buckled frame groaning ominously. He gave the dazed looking security guard a quick smile.

"And you managed to keep your passenger safe, too. How'd you persuade her to put on her seat – " He peered a little closer at the clutter in the foot wells.* "Has she been tidying?" he hissed, under his breath.

"She agreed to help out a little, yes," Aziraphale said, a little more cheerfully. "She didn't really take all that much convincing."

"You persuaded someone out of a possession by Sloth," Crowley said blankly.

"Well yes, I suppose."

He shook his head, the corner of his mouth sliding up into a helpless grin. "You really are something else, angel."

"Something other than what?" Aziraphale tutted, as Crowley swung himself behind the wheel and got the engine started with a painful sounding cough. "You know, sometimes I find your modes of expression quite impossible to understand."

"You'll get the hang of it," he said. And, conjuring the masonry dust off his sunglasses – even though he didn't really need them – Crowley drove them back** to a place that had once been called London. Back home.

 

*There are certain items that are mysteriously drawn to the foot wells of cars; empty water bottles, ice scrapers, road atlases find their way through interdimensional portals, even when the car's occupants never, for example, actually need to drink. 

**With a minor detour to deposit Zinzi Thomas back at her parents' house, convinced – by Crowley, at the behest of Aziraphale - that she'd had the nicest of all possible dreams.

*

The caffeine shop had his order ready for him when he arrived, trained into the habit after two weeks of daily visits. Hotel breakfasts had lost their appeal; now that he could chat to the angel whenever he happened to be in his transport, the Ritz dining room had felt strangely empty.

The sun was barely starting to turn the omnipresent pollution a paler shade of grey when Crowley carefully balanced the biodegradable cups - that the shop had only just begun stocking – on the roof of the Bentley and snaked the key out of his hip pocket. The oppressive cloud overhead roiled and shifted and, just for a moment, parted to let a stray sunbeam dart through to play on the silver wings of the Bentley symbol.

(Environmentalists couldn't quite explain how the pollution had apparently started to recede, just lately; Crowley suspected it was down to renewed effort on the part of the First of Four.)

Crowley grinned and adjusted his sunglasses before carefully leaning into the transport and placing the tea in front of one of the vents. He took his own coffee around to the cupholder on the driver's side then slid behind the wheel, drumming his hands on the console because he knew precisely how annoying it was. It had become a part of the morning routine.

"Morning, angel," he said brightly.

The voice that answered was female, with a regionless accent that was soothing and carefully designed for lifts in shopping centres, hold messages, sat navs.

"Driver's door open," it said.

The gentle tones had probably caused more road rage incidents than any five other causes put together; it was amazing, Crowley thought, how effective it was.

 

**Epilogue**

Crowley was a creature of habit.

Quarter past nine in the morning, Tuesday. The extensive London Monorail (constructed when the Underground had finally succumbed to the slurry they'd been attempting to pump out for years) had an express that ran several times an hour, collecting unremarkable souls from various boroughs and depositing them in one particular permutation of the business district.

On that service, in between the general tainting - the uncharitable thoughts he made sure to provoke with carefully planted annoyances - there were a few in particular he'd been working on. Pet projects. The business woman with the cats-eye glasses who had her eye on the gentleman with the antique horn rims (who looked almost – but not quite – entirely unlike her husband). The techie with the 'net jack in her neck who'd almost cracked Accounting's fiendish codes. The man who watched the back pockets and hand bags and briefcases in the compartment with hungry eyes. Basic stuff, low-grade evil, but the sort of slow craftsmanship that Crowley occasionally got to missing.

By any rights he'd be swaying slowly with the rest of them right now, leant insouciantly against a pole as he let his jacket hang a little more obviously open, the contents of his inside pocket practically on display. Giving up his seat next to horn rims like the gentleman he was. (Tech-girl he was mostly just watching; always owning the latest in computing didn't mean Crowley had any real idea how it worked.) Crowley was a creature of habit and, if you didn't think about the last two weeks (Crowley was trying not to think about the last two weeks) that had been his habit for longer than he cared to think about.

But there were other habits, was the thing. Older routines. There was a time that every third Tuesday morning had meant an outwardly reluctant trip to the South Bank book market, Aziraphale cooing gently over barely ripped front covers and oddly shaped stains, Crowley laughing under his breath at the self-consciously cool coffee-drinkers in the BFI. Not yet, though; this time of the morning was for the worst coffee Crowley'd ever tasted – Aziraphale had never bothered to get the hang of it – and the aimless bustling that always seems to happen just before trips regardless of how empty the rest of the day might be.

Crowley sank back into the corner of the once-green sofa, ignoring the prickle of dust in his nose, and narrowed his eyes. The light wasn't right of course, damped by the shield bubble and further by the dust motes that shifted slowly in the listless light, but he could almost see –

Of course, most of the appeal of the angel's bookshop was the lack of anything in the way of electrics: the ancient heap of a computer had been put to rest long ago; the kettle sat on top of the stove; there were always the lights, but it had never really been Hell's style to communicate through shadow puppets. His productivity might have dropped a little in the past couple of weeks. Not entirely, obviously, but he'd been… and there had been, okay, that tiny benediction in Finsbury Park, but in the grand scheme of things he was sure it barely counted. It was better to be on the safe side, though, find somewhere to hole up until it blew over; unless they sent someone _personally_…

It shouldn't have been possible, not for such a tiny piece of dangling brass, but the bell above the shop door _tolled_.

"We're closed!" he yelled, in as forbidding tones as he could manage.

"Well yes. I'd _gathered_."

Crowley caught his foot on the corner of the sofa in his headlong rush, practically fell through the door into the shop proper.

"A little upkeep was too much to ask?" Aziraphale asked, running a finger across the nearest bookshelf and making a face.

Crowley made the effort to close his mouth and stumbled forward, his feet feeling suddenly too big and clumsy.

"How – "

"I – thwarting, apparently," Aziraphale said, watching his approach with a smile that was more familiar than Crowley's own. "Your productivity dropped, rather, and Heaven can't go ignoring results like that."

When Crowley stopped he was far too close, looking the angel up and down with frankly disbelieving eyes.

"No update to the wardrobe at _all_?"

He could hear that his voice was wobbling on the edge of laughter; he supposed it was connected to the expansive feeling in his chest, like everything in there had outgrown him. Crowley leaned a little closer and this time didn't manage to hold in the laughter at all.

"You smell dusty. How can you possibly smell dusty? You've been in _Heaven_!"

Aziraphale shrugged. "Habit?"

That was about all Crowley could take. He let his forehead drop forward against scratchy tweed, relieved hitching gusts of laughter escaping him, every unsteady breath reassuring, in a musty sort of way.

"Exactly," Aziraphale murmured into the hair just behind his ear, his hand coming up to rest on Crowley's back. "It's good to be home."


End file.
